14 DAY TRIAL // As part of the transition to devices and services, Microsoft is spending a fortune on cloud solutions and server software, so it's not surprising that Windows Azure has grown so much that it's now helping Redmond challenge the leading position held since forever by Apache.
A research conducted by Netcraft shows that Microsoft gained no less than nine million new websites this month, which means that it actually managed to improve its market share by 0.37 percent.
Apache, on the other, lost 0.18 percent of the websites and now has a share of 37.6 percent, as compared to Microsoft which is very close at only 33.5 percent.
“Apache has been the most commonly used web server for more than 18 years, but this is the closest Microsoft has ever been to threatening this position,” Netcraft explained.
At this point, approximately 7 million websites included in this month's survey were using Microsoft IIS, with approximately 11,000 being based on Microsoft Azure tech. The May 2014 research included a total of 975,262,468 sites, which is 16 million more than last month, according to Netcraft's own details.
“[This helps] to maintain Microsoft's position as the largest Windows hosting company in terms on web-facing computers. Most of the new IIS sites at Azure are hosted in the US, with more than a third of the total being hosted in the North Central US Azure region alone,” it's mentioned in the research, which puts the emphasis on the fact that Microsoft is very close to taking over the leading position that has belonged to Apache for so many years.
Azure is playing a key role in Microsoft's long-term strategy and the company is permanently looking into ways to improve the experience offered to users, so new updates are released on a regular basis.
At the same time, the software giant also tried to make the whole platform a little bit less confusing by rebranding it from Windows Azure to Microsoft Azure. The change was made because the company wanted to make a better difference between Windows and its cloud offering.
“Today we are announcing that Windows Azure will be renamed to Microsoft Azure, beginning April 3, 2014. This change reflects Microsoft’s strategy and focus on Azure as the public cloud platform for customers as well as for our own services Office 365, Dynamics CRM, Bing, OneDrive, Skype, and Xbox Live,” Microsoft announced in a press statement in late March.